Yet people who met her were stupid enough to think she is some kind of genius and gave her millions of dollars.
Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup instead of killing people he would have had millions in investments and be praised as some sort of wunder kind...
Or Charles Manson could weasel his way into existing startups, claim them as his own, become the richest man in the world, AND kill so many more people than he ever thought possible!
Elon's DOGE is responsible for over 100k deaths. Some died a horrible death with medical devices stuck in them because there was no one to remove them after all funding was instantly cut. One of the most inhumane and disgusting acts in history.
The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2021, and projects that DOGE's cuts to USAID will result in 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million deaths of children under 5, by 2030.
The Harvard articfle is just PR for a documentary that focuses on an individual (IE, an anecdote intended to be emotionally manipulative).
As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.
> As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.
How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomised trial of this kind of intervention? Like, the Lancet definitely hop on far too many bandwagons for my taste, but it's almost certain that the withdrawal of USAID will cause ~millions of otherwise avoidable deaths.
And ultimately, it's the choice of the US government and people whether or not to fund these programmes. Personally, I think that they are worthwhile, but others may disagree.
But really, you're holding the evidence required here to a very high standard, one that many things you believe would probably not meet.
Thanks, this is more thoughtful than most of the replies I've seen.
I don't think anybody proposed or considered running a randomized trial.
I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded. Otherwise it's just emotional manipulation- "fight the change by making up numbers that sound bad".
> I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded.
I mean, this is basically the evidence standard that we use for flu/respiratory illness deaths, along with lots of other hard to measure interventions.
Personally, even if there were no deaths due to USAID being removed, it would still have been a strategically bad thing for the US government to do, in terms of soft power.
Additionally, the US are noted in development circles for circular aid, in that they gave a lot, but then required it all to be spent on US goods, so it was more of a subsidy for domestic producers.
I do agree that lots of people just jump on these numbers uncritically, because of prior beliefs about Musk/Trump/DOGE, but it would be very very surprising if there weren't lots of avoidable deaths due to the cutting off of aid. Like, the same thing could have been accomplished in a much better way by tapering off the aid as programmes expired.
>Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil”. Musk has claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “corrupt politicians”.
those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc.
I understand feeling emotional about this, I really do. But the important bit is that if you make a big claim "millions of people died", you have to back that with actual evidence, not models.
> those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc.
I think that this is an unrealistic ask, right now. Over the next 5-10 years enough time will have passed such that we can get more accurate numbers, but right now, all we have are estimates with wide confidence bounds (but narrower than they were last year).
Nope. And I hate that entire comic for poisoninh the very idea that asking for the evidence is wrong.
I'm operating in good faith asking people to show data. There is no reliable data supporting the claim that millions of people died because usaid was canceled. That's all.
IIRC, I personally read three different articles where journalists on the ground described specific deaths (with names) from the sudden and unexpected cutoff of aid. And there were studies from top-ranked universities numbering deaths in the hundreds of thousands, extending to millions over time. I do not have these links on hand, but I’m sure you can find them if you’re genuinely interested.
I've spent time looking and can't find anything reputable, so please share links. The studies you're referring to aren't based on evidence, they're estimates. If you're reading articles with specific names, that's journalism by anecdote not data.
I care about facts and data and I know how to read through propaganda. What DOGE did was terrible but I don't really see reliable evidence here for the scale and scope of what the media reported.
The problem here is that you are taking as fact something that a person with a vested interested in making Musk look bad has said. I'm just asking: where is the evidence supporting the claims for the deaths of this magnitude?
My point is that the most prominent tech CEO definitely killed people through reckless action, without apology or remorse. The actual number is unquestionably more than ten; almost certainly in the thousands; and, based (again) on research from people who study this kind of thing for a living, likely in the hundreds of thousands.
But even if he “only” killed 10 people (which we know for a fact based on reporting), that should be more than enough to make him persona non grata in polite society.
The actual numbers are more useful for the history books and eventual tribunals. Maybe that data can be gathered more definitively over time; I’m sure people are working on it as we speak.
Many meaningful change in government policy will cause some people to die. Are you going to tar every politician who makes a decision/law/policy that causes some people to die to be persona non grata?
I think much of people's response to this is driven by emotion, but that's the wrong approach to fighting the current administration and its enablers (organization, protest, daylighting actual problems, and understanding the psychology of the administration all go much further). Further, I think that posting bombastic, unrealistic claims about deaths is just misleading people who are already responding emotionally. Emotions will not get you anywhere in this environment.
Sure, what Elon and his DOGE buddies did was a travesty. But I believe if we're going to fight this, we can't just rest on arbitrary made-up numbers of foreign deaths as a reason to retain a funding vehicle.
Yeah but what exactly are we to do? If the bar for proof is so high, there isn't a way to meet it as these things are super complex. I'm all for being rational but at some point we need to accept something is stupid and stop trying to prove it so we can do something about it. What I observe up and down this thread is a demand for very specific evidence for something which is stupid on its face.
If your question is "what is the most rational process to follow to reduce the impact of the current administration on US aid funding around the world", then I think getting as many people to vote for democrats is probably the best approach.
It's unlikely anybody can actively prevent the executive wing of the government in the short term, especially with a president who violates all norms and ignores legal decisions.
As a bit of an aside, I would like to know how the US got into the situation where we were being depended upon to provide millions of dollars in aid to prevent millions of deaths- the engineer in me says "there is a root cause that should be solved"
I don't think this is hard to understand. The biggest employers in America have people who are on food stamps. When we deprive people of resources, what else do we expect?
Aid could have been tapered; advance warning could have been given. But Musk very publicly delighted in feeding USAID into the woodchipper, causing people to die as a direct result of his hasty actions. He simply did not give a fuck about the damage he caused.
This is not how changes to government policy are done. And yes, I’m livid and will eagerly vote anyone into office who will chase down this monster and force him (and his DOGE boys) to face justice. I am far from alone in this.
All of these numbers are based on a single source, the Impact Counter dashboard made by a BU professor, which is full of methodological problems. It assumes 100% cessation of funds, for example, while in reality there was a freeze.
Who was it again that said money is thrown out the window without any concern, you just have to stand below the right window? It was true then and it is true now. Really helps if the money you are throwing out isn't your own, too.
> Sometimes I think if Charles Manson started a startup
We like to think we live in a meritocracy, but the fact so much of success is based on personality, manipulating people, being charming and persuasive, tapping into others' insecurities and ambitions.
Elizabeth Holmes is a symptom of the same basic human dysfunction that brought us Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
All founders and CEOs are like this, to the point that when I meet a person in leadership who clearly isn't a sociopath my default reaction is to assume that they're not successful.
The only reason I'm somewhat confident that I am not a sociopath is because I am still frequently presented business ideas that make me think "WTF how did you even think of that and why am I so angry that it's probably going to work"
Yeah but the “vision” was just the ideas of a kid with 2 semesters of college classes under her belt saying “what if”. It was never going to work. She had tons of competent engineers working for her. The basic idea was and is unworkable.
If she had come up with an actual good idea with only 2 semesters of experience then sure you could say she was a genius. Even if she couldn’t successfully build a company. But the most you say is that she is a really good conman.
To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable. Sometimes the environment or available technology just have to change/improve/scale a tiny bit more for something to go from unworkable to workable.
Still, what she did was obvious fraud straight up, not just "lets bang our head against this until it works".
That’s true. But this idea was unworkable because of basic biology/physics. It doesn’t matter how good the sensor is if you’re dealing with bad samples.
For most of the tests they wanted to perform, a finger stick will always provide an unrepresentative sample. And not in a predictable way.
The thing is experienced people knew this. All you had to do was to talk to anyone who knew the biology and they would have told you this could never work. Not this can’t work with today’s technology, but this is fundamentally at odds with reality.
But the implication is that others weren't banging their heads. The amount of money invested in this particular domain is in the tens, if not hundreds, of billions. There are so many companies whose lives, whose workflows, product lines would be made vastly easier.
The thing that calls her out as a scammer is that Theranos probably invested more money in the faking it, the deception, with Siemens equipment than they did in actually trying to solve the problem itself.
> To be fair, lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable until someone bangs their head against it enough times and suddenly it is workable.
Sure, but also lots of "basic ideas" are unworkable regardless of how many times heads get banged, due to some fundamental limitation, like perpetual motion machines or homeopathy. It's a spectrum, but from what I understand Theranos was closer to the "unworkable in theory" side of things than the "currently unworkable in practice" side of things.
And surely with all the competent engineers working for her, she could have figured out where to pivot to, once she understood that the original basic idea was unworkable.
Plenty of founders keep pivoting, all the time in the beginning, so it says something about her that she doubled down on it to the point of fraud.
An official motto of a president of one of the biggest software companies in Poland (Comarch) was "you can replace any experienced engineer with a finite amount of sutdents... for half of the cost".
Here in Switzerland new AI datacenters are also causing some uproar but a lot less because regulations are rigid enough in most places that you can only build them if you do so cleanly. You can't just take all the water, electricity, make noise and polute.
I live next to a waste valorisation plant and they have very over sized water cooling systems because they need to keep the noise below regulation. They also for example have under pressure in the trash receiving bunker to prevent smells from escaping. All regulations that cost money but are the benefit of all.
Define LLMs. Current models look pretty different to the vanilla transformer from 2017. And its not even known what architecture and training innovations the frontier is using, right?
> Nvidia is investing in the open source ecosystem
Wasn't always the case and will probably only be as long as there is a self interest.
> Linus Torvalds himself noted that the AI boom changed NVIDIA, turning them into a much better contributor to the Linux kernel Linus Torvalds: AI CHANGED NVIDIA.
It generally was always the case. Nvidia was a huge stakeholder in technologies like OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan, supporting Khronos' goal to further expand the FOSS API ecosystem.
Linus is probably referring to Nvidia's "open" driver series and capitulation on EGLStream. Nvidia got a terrible reputation for refusing to implement GBM for Wayland desktops, insisting on the nonstandard EGLStream protocol for close to a decade. Around 2024 (550-series drivers) they gave up and reworked their drivers for GBM-agnostic usage, fixing Wayland and generally resolving the biggest gripe people had against Nvidia hardware.
> Today we were made aware that the US Government has targeted a small, volunteer-run, technology collective from Italy with disproportionate sanctions as anyone can read in the Treasury Department Statement, the State Department Statement and the related Executive Order.
> We deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.
> We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from their own violence and warmongering.
> Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.
Leaving 50,000 people – including the elderly, the vulnerable and the sick – without electricity in Berlin in the middle of winter during the festive season is being passed off as activism?
The terrorists who caused this suffering also argued with anti-capitalism.
So anyone who claims that anti-capitalism and anti-fascism cannot also be forms of terrorism is simply a propagandist.
Why do you think these volunteers supported the attack? I don't think there's a published statement to the effect. Even the U.S. government does not claim that (at least not in its written communication).
The perpetrators very likely used Apple and Google services, too, and no one views that as some sort of endorsement by the companies.
And I would bet that a quite few people from those bubbles would answer yes.
For me, statements like "antifacism and anticapitalism are not terrorism" is propaganda hidden in political slogans, not meaningful definitions. Their intention is to shield acts committed under those labels from being judged by the same standard as politcally less sympathetic violence.
Terrorism does not stop being terrorism because the people claim to fight capitalism, fascism, religion, imperialism or anything else?
Is Christianity terrorism? As a religion obviously not. But still horrific acts were done in the name of Christianity and the Islam. Just ask the witches...
So labeling yourself an anti-fascist or anti-capitalist does not magically makes you a non-terrorist.
So labeling yourself an anti-fascist or anti-capitalist does not magically makes you a non-terrorist
nor does the label make a terrorist. it's a neutral statement. the original claim was that the label alone means you support/condone the actions of those who engage in terrorist acts in the name of that label.
> And I would bet that a quite few people from those bubbles would answer yes.
while i don’t have a dog in this particular fight, you can find “quite a few people” who will answer yes to just about the craziest shit you can imagine. it’s like the rule 34 of dipshittery. this most certainly does not make christians liable for the kkk or grandpa style republicans liable for fascists or whatever. and we probably need more evidence than that to justify what’s happening here.
Yours is simply a logical fallacy. Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. That's a fact, they are ideologies expressed in a multitude of ways, most of which absolutely pacific.
This doesn't mean that it's impossible for terrorist acts to be committed in the name of those ideologies, but also this doesn't make those ideologies inherently equivalent to terrorism.
Antifascism and anticapitalism are necessarily violent. You can't resist nazis without punching them back. You can't stop capitalism without expropriating the expropriators.
No, they are not. That wont stop an enlightened anarchist or antifascist from insisting that they are, and lying about this to as a pretext for their violence.
as fascism and capitalism are just labels you can put on anybody you like (as this is just a subjective opinion), you have a cheap excuse to harm everybody with violence as you like.
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